To save Alexander Johnson’s face, we must all cover our faces. I won’t repeat here all the many objections I have made before to compulsory masking, or explain yet again why these measures are of doubtful value, to put it mildly.
This is their motivation, an apparent attempt to divert attention from Partygate. It irks my this time around. It is the bizarre upside-down and inside-out media reactions to this absurdity. The wrong people are being criticized and we get mad at them.
Here we all are demanding that the police be called to investigate… a Christmas party. It is not about the Watergate burglary, or the Profumo Affair.
We have to deal with some government workers who enjoyed a festive drink at the office. These occasions are something I detest and would prefer to avoid. However, they’re quite popular with other people.
To save Alexander Johnson’s face, we must all cover our faces. I won’t repeat here all the many objections I have made before to compulsory masking, or explain yet again why these measures are of doubtful value, to put it mildly
There are two reasons why people hate this event. First, the insane regulations that kept husbands and wives from dying, as well as children, from their parents’ deathbeds at the time these illegal junketings took place, are what fuelled the fury against this event. Another is the fact that courts continue to impose appalling penalties on citizens who have also defied the ban on Christmas parties a year back.
These regulations are the real cause of fury. Even if you believe that measures of this kind are much help (I don’t), anyone with any sense could see that cruel separation of close relatives at the end of life was not a proportionate response to Covid.
It was fanatical and inhuman Communist action that shouldn’t have been allowed.
This is the true reason people are furious that regulations exist at all. Even if you believe that measures of this kind are much help (I don’t), anyone with any sense could see that cruel separation of close relatives at the end of life was not a proportionate response to Covid, writes Peter Hitchens
I keep hearing the word ‘proportionate’ being used about Covid measures now. This was not common back in the day. As I said then, we went mad, like a man who burns down his own house to get rid of a wasps’ nest.
You should not be mad at Downing Street for hosting Christmas parties. It is that all other people were forbidden from doing so. If such laws were in place in China, I think they would be normal. However, we don’t live under such an awful police state. Sweden demonstrated that it is possible to trust people to act sensibly, and the results were no worse than those in Sweden.
There’s one other part of this which gives me the creeps. Allegra Struton, former government spokesperson, is not someone I know and would probably never like. She is not a dangerous or wicked person and her treatment is very disgusting.
In other words, an informer and nark has made a recording of the conversation she had in private. They then made it public, likely for charitable reasons. We should also remember that this wasn’t an extreme abuse of power.
A fellow creature was reduced to crying in public, and she had to be humiliated before TV’s righteous judges.
All those who participated in gleefully destroying Mrs. Stratton must think about this question: What have you ever shared in private with friends that you don’t want to see broadcast on the national media? Anything? Ever? No little incorrect joke that some po-faced Covid Commissar could turn into an indictment that – if well-timed – would ruin your life and career? We hope you don’t have any enemies that are as shady as you.
This is not morally distinct from 1984’s totalitarian surveillance, but I don’t know.
Allegra Ston, former spokeswoman for the government, is someone I don’t know. I also doubt that I would be able to like her. However, I don’t think she is evil or dangerous and the way she has been treated is disgusting.
We were seduced by the assurances of the US government that Julian Assange will be treated well during his decades in America’s hard-core prisons, and our judges granted Assange extradition. This is quite sad.
The English court should have thrown this case out of hand as it is completely political. In the end, Mr Assange was a journalist performing his job. If he is able to be taken off to Federal prison, then no UK journalist who exposes troubling facts about America is safe.
Even though our Prime Minister is a former journalist, there is still some of that troublemaking spirit within him. I do hope so. The American government didn’t exact any revenge when Theresa May blocked Gary McKinnon’s extradition to the USA, as was court approved. Although they grumbled and muttered, the Americans ultimately respected those nations that stood up to them far more than those that did not.
He should not allow Assange to go to America, and should instead release him from Belmarsh’s cruel, long-term imprisonment.
China’s the Empire that alarms me
One time, reading was the best way to explore the present, future, and remote parts of the Earth. In those days, I used to read Jules Verne’s 19th Century adventure novels with wide-eyed, boyish pleasure.
His description of a stable, solid world with steamers and trains, which was quieter, more secure, than ours, impressed me. So I really ought to look forward to the new BBC serialisation of Around The World In Eighty Days, Phileas Fogg’s great fictional journey.
But its main actor, David Tennant, wants us to know he disapproves of Verne’s world, moaning that ‘in many ways Phileas Fogg represents everything that’s alarming and peculiar about that old sense of British Empire’. It’s a weird thing to say anyway.
But, why is Mr Tennant, a modish person, so determined to denigrate the British Empire, which vanished long before?
The Chinese Empire is the one he doesn’t like, trampling the Uighurs and Tibetans of Sinkiang.
The government also commits murder of its own citizens. This crime is something we condemn loudly in the West, but we don’t care about in Peking. This is alarming, yet strange and is happening right now.
Never listen to Macho Talk on Drugs.
Is anyone else still able to recall Ian Blair (former Met Police Commissioner) threatening, in 2005, to bring an end the middle-class drug users. Sajid Javid made the exact same threat when he was Home Secretary in 2018.
Now the Prime Minister dons a police woolly hat and declares that he will ‘look at taking away passports and driving licences’ from such people. Let’s see what happens. Bizarrely, he thinks that we still lock people up ‘again and again’ for ‘using’ drugs, a claim I’d like to see evidence for. The de facto criminalization of drug possession goes on. This is why his pledge to stamp out so-called ‘county lines’ (macho, pseudo-American police-speak for ‘small-town drug dealers’) will never succeed. If you don’t stamp out the demand, you will never stamp out the supply.
We should follow the lead of South Korea and Japan, which prosecute drug addicts not only for dealing but also for possessing drugs. The existing law would make drug use much less if it was applied. This is just like how drink driving became very diminished after they got the breathalyzer.
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